Anthropic CFO: Wrong Compute Bet Kills Your Company

Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao spends 30-40% of his time on compute decisions, warning that buying too much or too little compute is equally fatal for frontier AI labs. He calls compute the lifeblood of the business and spreads risk across Nvidia GPUs, Amazon Trainium, and Google TPUs to avoid vendor lock-in. The strategy explains why all three public companies are simultaneously Anthropic suppliers and investors. Nvidia reported $62.31B in Q1 data center revenue, Amazon holds a $364B cloud backlog, and Google Cloud grew 63% to $20.03B. Rao warns that small shifts in growth rates create wildly different outcomes one to two years out.